Help on calculate bandwith usage for VOD

Hi,

I have been contacted by a video’s producer interesting in creating a website for his business where he can charge for accessing his work. Up to now he is using YouTube but he thinks setting up his own website he will be able to to monetize his videos more effectively.
Building the website itself is nothing out of the ordinary, my issue is computing the bandwidth he might need. He is producing about 35’000 (thirty-five thousand) videos per year, average weight per video is about 40Mb. If I am not mistaken this would required about 1’400Mb or 1.4Tb of disk space for just storin them, right ?

According to the figures I saw in his YouTube channel his most popular videos has been viewed about 80’000 times during the last 5 months. Considering only this video (32 mb) how do I compute the overall bandwidth consumed ? Is this calculation: 80000 x 32 = 2’560’000Mb or 2’560 Gb correct ?
Other videos have been seen much less than that and on average, during a year, I think it is somewhere about 60 views per video. Is it fair to say that for bandwidth he would need 35000 (number of videos) x 40 (weight) x 50 (views) = 70 Tb just for the 1st year ?

I’d assume the usage is roughly (per video) is number of plays x file size. Of course that assumes that everyone watches every video to the end, or whether the whole file has been downloaded/streamed or not.

If you want to work out bandwidth requirements for a new server I’d probably look at getting some sort of average usage per month based on all videos, then multiplying that by 12 to get annual numbers.

There could also be other factors at play, just because he will run videos on his own site doesn’t necessarily mean they will be viewed as much as they are on Youtube so your bandwidth could be significantly less.

I think at the end of the day all you’d be able to do is make some assumptions, monitor bandwidth usage on the new site for the first few months and adjust your bandwidth pool accordingly. If I was doing something like this I’d be looking at a server facility where bandwidth allocation can be upped or lowered as you need it so you can control your monthly budget.

Good point about the possible decrease of views when moving away from YouTube.
And you’re right I am looking for some cloud hosting where I would be able to adjust resources, it’s sort of scary when doing the math with or without views I still need 1.4 Tb for one year of video !

I also should have mentioned he also plans to do some live broadcast.

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